This post is one that I have been looking forward to writing for quite some time now. When I decided to take a leap of faith and pursue this career path, I’ve been itching to make sound and music for video games. This past weekend I was able to participate in my first game jam, and take my first steps of making my dream become a reality! I want to mainly focus on the sound design, but I wanted to give you guys an insight into my first-time experience with this particular jam and the group that held this jam in the first place.
More About The Game Jam
After signing up for the Jam, we all met up at the VCU library to introduce the teams and to go over the theme of the Jam. I was pretty nervous walking into the building. Not only was this my first time trying anything like this, but because it was held at the VCU library, I was worried that I wouldn’t belong because I am not a college student anymore. The latter worry quickly dissolved when I met the people in my team and around the room. Sure there were a few college students, but honestly, there was a wide range of ages and skill sets in the room. It all felt very welcoming, especially with how every single person in the room was passionate about games and just wanted to make them for the love of making games.
I was able to meet my team and everyone on the team was highly talented and very kind to me. We had a presentation for beginners to make the most out of the jam, and then afterward we got our theme for the jam. Each team was tasked to make a game in 48 hours with the theme of bubble. Our team quickly brainstormed various ideas for the game and we eventually landed on an incremental clicker-type game similar to cookie clicker; where you click on bubbles and buy upgrades at the store. Nice, simple, and if we pulled it off, an addicting gameplay loop.
I struggled a little bit at the beginning because when we merged teams, we ended up having two people on our team working on sound. I have never worked with another sound guy and was pretty intimidated by it. To be honest, there are certain areas that I don’t have much confidence in and feel pretty insecure about, that’s why I was hesitant. After speaking to my teammate, my anxieties were eased because my teammate was super nice and we had a good conversation about music. We eventually ended with a division of work that included him doing the music for the game, and I would take care of the sound design. After agreeing to it, we got to work.
Getting Started on Sound Design
I knew from the very beginning that I wanted to record and design all of my own sounds. The reason I won’t go into here as I’ve explained it in one of my previous posts. One thing I did find out very quickly was that as much as I wanted to participate with my teammates in person with sound design, in practice, it was not very practical. For one, I don’t have a good setup for a portable studio, such as a laptop with all of my music software. I was able to bring my sound recorder and my microphone with a mic stand with me to the library, ready to record anything. I thought it would be weird, but no one cared about all the equipment I brought. Even though I brought all the equipment, I realized outside of this, there was not much I could contribute sound-wise in person, so I tried to make the best of the situation and came up with songs as sort of a contingency plan in case anything happened with my teammate.
Before you ask, yes, I did bring my steam deck. It is actually a capable Linux desktop and even though most of my music software is Windows-based, I was able to get some audio work done on it.
Once I found a quiet corner in the library, I was able to set up a mini recording room, where my teammates and I can help contribute towards the overall sound for our game.
With this setup, I had my Shure SM57 microphone plugged into my H4N Zoom recorder. I also set it up to record in mono. I usually record all my sound effects in mono because it makes it easier in software to pan the sound left or right or pretty much anywhere in the virtual space to give the sound the illusion of space. At least that’s what I’ve found in my experience so far, but I’m still learning. I picked the SM57 mic because I wasn’t sure if we were going to record just voice or any other objects, and this is a good all-around mic for anything. On top of the fact that it’s also tough as nails, so if someone drops it or anything, it won’t be damaged.
In the next section, I thought it would be more informative if I talked about each sound effect and how I made it. Not only because I like talking about this stuff, but if anyone from the wider local game jam community is reading this, I hope it will be very informative and inspirational for other projects. This community has been so kind to me and this is the least I can do to give back.
Bubble Pop Sound Effect
Right now I’m starting with the easiest sound effect, the bubble pop sound when you click on the bubble. This sound effect was simply myself and the rest of the teammates going into the impromptu recording room and recording our best sound with our mouths. Two people were unable to make it but one person did send me a sound recording that I was able to include as well. After I got the recordings, all I did was some light touch-up of the audio in Izotope RX.
I just mainly normalized the recording to -3db and isolated the best 3 sounds in each recording. In total, we had 12 different sounds and our programmer was able to make a sound bank and randomize what sound was played when a bubble was popped. Not only was this good as everyone who wanted to be included in the sound was included, but since these sounds came from different people, it got rid of the repetitive sound issue if the same sound was played over and over again when players popped a bubble.
Title Screen Ocean Sound
This sound effect was a happy coincidence in my quest to pad out my sound library. I took a trip a couple of months back to Maine and decided to record ocean sounds. This is what you are hearing in the game. To know more about my process for that recording, check out this post. The only thing I did was mix it down to mono because the original stereo recording was too distracting for this type of project.
Shop Menu Sounds
These sounds were made pretty much with the same process as I described above with the bubble popping sounds, but this time it was recorded in my home studio. For the purchase sound, that was simply rattling around my key chain. It was simple, yet effective. The sound you get when you can’t afford something in the shop was myself exhaling a forceful puff of air. I really couldn’t think of any other sound for it besides sticking to the theme of using mouth sounds.
As for the menu button sound when you open the shop, I decided to layer the sound of everyone’s bubble pop sound and added some light processing. My main concern for the whole project was to keep the sound design language consistent and not make it sound like each sound belonged to something completely different. Honestly, with this sound, the more I play the game, the more I think it sounds too similar to the bubble pop sound for my liking. When I plan to revisit this game with my team if we decide to flesh it out post-jam, I will look into changing this sound.
Bomb Bubble Pop
From this point on, all these sounds were heavily processed.
For the bomb bubble sound, I thought it would be a good idea to grab balloons and record the sound of them popping. Making balloons pop is something I hate doing, but it has to be done. I think I got a little too anxious about it because when I listened to the recordings, they were way higher pitched than I wanted. I think this was a result of me not blowing up the balloons to be as big as they could be. I think if I re-recorded this in the future, I will have to set aside my fears and blow these balloons up until they pop, rather than popping them myself with a paperclip.
I was able to make it work in the end with a bit more processing work. I opened up my DAW of choice, FL Studio, and got to work. The first thing I did was time stretch the sample and pitched it down a little. I then used one of FL studio’s newest plugins called low lifter, which does exactly what it sounds, lifts the low end. After doing this, it sounded a bit on the muddier side for me, so I used a plugin I got recently for free called DeBoom by Eventide. This did a great job removing the mud, but keeping the deep thud.
The last thing I did to sell the deep underwater explosion sound was something I picked while watching some sound design videos on social media (I couldn’t tell you where to find the video, I watched this months ago). What they did was grab the parametric EQ from FL studio and at the tail end of the sound, recorded automation of moving the EQ node around with your mouse. I recorded multiple takes of moving the node around for each sound to get the sound I wanted. The result looked something like this.
That was pretty much all the processing that went into the bomb popping sound
Confetti Bubble Pop
This was the most involved sound effect that I’ve worked on for this entire game jam.
The first thing I did after sleeping on how to go about it was go to my local party store. I had the idea to record the sound of one of those confetti poppers that you see around New Year’s. The ones that I was hoping to get would be the ones where you pull the string and a small amount of charge would explode and push the paper confetti out of the tube. I wasn’t able to find that specific type at my party store, I was able to find these poppers that use a metal spring to push the confetti out.
I recorded these poppers at my home studio and did the usual cleanup and processing as described above. I am glad I decided to record this at home and not the library because it left a pretty big mess when I was done.
After recording these sounds, our team requested that we also include some sort of crowd cheering “YAY!” to the confetti sound. My initial plan for this would be to record everyone cheering like this at the library. Unfortunately by the time we were ready to record this, certain circumstances prevented us from doing so. It was partially that on the second day, fewer people from our team showed up to the co-working hours. There was also the fact that on that day, there was no empty room to set up a recording session as it was pretty busy in the library.
I have a naturally high falsetto, so what I ended up doing was recording myself cheering Yays in my home studio utilizing my falsetto. After recording and cleaning these recordings I layered the confetti pop sound as well as 5 different yay sounds from myself on top of each other. I purposefully staggered some Yays slightly before and some Yays slightly after the sound to give the illusion of a crowd cheering and not being exactly on time.
The pop sound from the confetti did not have the high-end shimmer I was looking for when I was recording it and it sounded a little dry. For this sound I slightly time stretched it out first which helped a little. I then used Sheen Machine from Eventide, again, I got this for free recently. It was slowly getting there, but it was still missing that exciting high-end sizzle. I was browsing the presets from FL Studio’s Patcher plugin (a highly underrated tool) and found a noise amplitude follower plugin within it. This amplitude follower was exactly what cracked the code and gave me that lasting shimmer I was looking for. I then added a little bit of reverb to make it sound a little more impactful.
I processed the yay sounds even further from here. I mixed the volume of all 5 of the yay sounds to get a blend that I was satisfied with. I did a little bit of pitch shifting to them. Some of the Yays I pitched shifted quite a bit higher while for others I didn’t shift too much because my falsetto was high enough for it. To try and make the pitch shift not sound too chipmunk-y, I used the Pitcher plugin that came with FL Studio. Pitcher can be thought of as simply an auto-tune plugin, however, I was not interested in the auto-tune part of the plugin. This plugin also has a formant adjuster knob for the vocal and I wanted to use that to adjust the formant.
Formants are pretty much a way of describing how the voice itself sounds. On the pitcher plugin, they describe it as the difference between sounding male and female. I personally don’t like thinking about it that way. The way I like to think about formants draws back to my experience singing in choir. We had exercises in choir where we would go from singing more forward, towards the front of our face/nose, and then singing towards the back of our throat. These exercises are essentially the analog version of shifting our formants, and I’ve always thought of formants as the digital equivalent of this. Changing it will help mitigate the chipmunk sound, but it won’t go away 100%.
After getting the individual yay sounds dialed in, I feed all the separate yay mixer tracks into a separate bus to add the Izotope voice doubler plugin to it. That way I can get each of the 5 yay sounds together to sound even more like a crowd. After the doubling, it was then fed into the fruity convolver reverb plugin to give the illusion that these are all separate voices being recorded in the same room.
After the confetti pop sound and the vocal yay sounds were processed how I liked separately, I put another fruity convolver reverb on the master bus to glue everything together.
Title Music for Sea Burst
The next part of the sound for the game involves the music. I will start by talking about the music for the intro levels of this game because I don’t really have much to say about it. The music was composed by James, a very talented dude who was able to make the music you will hear first when you play the game. I can’t speak for how it was made, but I can say that he was inspired by classical music, such as Handel, and he is into studying the music theory behind these pieces. From my ears, it sounds like his song follows the norms and instrumental voicing you’d expect from music typical of that period, although I can’t say much further from that because it really is not an area that I would consider myself an expert in. The song is in the key of F major.
What I can say is that we were really running short on time to make a song for the second level, and I came up with a clever solution to stretch the first level song into the second level. I ended up grabbing the same recording that James made, and applied a low pass filter to it. After that, I added some chorusing to it to give the recording a bit of a wave sound. This was all in an attempt to give the illusion that you are going deeper underwater with the music being distorted along the way. I could’ve/should’ve done that for the sound effects as well, but that might be something to revisit in a post update.
Deep Underwater Music for Sea Burst
Our composer, James, had a lot going on personally during the game jam. It’s not for me to discuss it here but I am so grateful that he was able to finish the music that he was able to finish for our game. Our team thought it would be a good idea to have a different song for the final level, when you reach further underwater, and with these circumstances, it was up to me to fill the role. In the end I thought it worked out perfectly, because having the game go from one composer’s voice to another is a great way to go from a familiar place, to a strange place. Just like you would get from going to the beach, to a little bit under the surface, and then to the unknown depths.
From our beginning recording sessions, I found out that one of our team mates, Sully, had this very interesting and unique whistle. I would describe it as a normal whistle but with a lower frequency hum underneath it at the same time. I was very excited to record this and just experiment and exploring the sonic possibilities! Here is a little screenshot of what the spectrogram looks like with the whistle.
You can see from the graph that not only is this a very clean signal, but you can also see both the high frequency whistle, along with with a low frequency undertone.
After experimenting around with the sample a bit, I was able to get some interesting sounds feeding a portion of this sample into FL Granulizer. To keep it very brief, granular synthesis just involves taking a sample and chopping it up into tiny pieces, called grains, and then afterward having the option to change grain size and the randomness of which they play. At the same time I was doing this, I was applying some reverb from the Valhalla Supermassive plugin. This made a warbly, low-frequency sound that was the perfect basis for an instrument for this deep water music.
Quick aside, I can not say enough good things about Supermassive by Valhalla. It is an incredibly versatile and useful plugin for sound design that every sound designer should have. The UI is also clean and simple. I also personally really love playing around with the warp knob on this plugin. I still find it to be absolutely crazy that Valhalla gives this plugin away for free!
After getting the base sound, I then played the granulizer with my MIDI keyboard to get the different whistling pitches you hear in the song. Since it’s the music for a strange, unknown place, I did my best to play some dissonant notes. It’s not a nice place, and it shouldn’t have a nice melody.
Between some of the silence, I used some high, digital sounds provided by the CMI V synthesizer from the Arturia collection. This software synth is modeled after the Fairlight CMI, which is a computer-based sampler synthesizer released in the 80’s. The reason I love to use this synth in general is because it’s really good at making very cold, almost industrial-like sounds. I thought this instrument was perfect for this track. I found a preset I like within the CMI, tweaked it a bit, and fed it into Supermassive. I then played it in between some of the whistles. It really supports and augments the warbly whistle. Not to mention that it sounds really cool! It actually reminds me of the sounds you’d probably hear in the PlayStation 2 menu.
The last thing I did towards the end of the track, I grabbed the granulizer and copied it so that I could apply a different effects chain to the whistle. This time I added some distortion through FL Distuctor, 2 different delay plugins, and then added the FL effector plugin at the end of the chain. The effector was done so that I could add some further bit crushing to it, but also have the ability to live automate it for a bit more modulation in the distortion. The result of this was a sound similar to the CMI, but different, so it was nice to have that for some variety. I then added some regular reverb to have it stand out from supermassive, but still glue itself to the mix. Below is the slight modulation I did on the effector plugin.
Conclusion
We’ve arrived at the conclusion of this post. Thank you so much for reading all of this! As a reward for making it this far, further below I’ll leave a link to the game. I just wanted to say that although having knowledge in general audio engineering and the science behind sound is helpful in figuring this stuff out, at the end of the day, I treat it like a giant sandbox. Just tweak some knobs, break everything, and have fun discovering what is possible!
I hope this post was insightful as well as inspirational for anyone out there who wants to make their own sounds. I will always treasure my experience doing the sound for Sea Burst. I learned a lot about how to work as a team and how to implement sounds into a game with this jam. I am looking forward to participating in many more game jams and any other video game projects that come my way!
If you have any questions whatsoever about anything in this post, sound in general, or want to work with me in the future, please comment on this post. You can also keep up with what I’m doing on this site or follow me on Bluesky. I also have a contact form in the “about me” section if you want to email me privately about something. Hope everyone out there has a wonderful time creating controlled chaos!
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